FAQ

What is Quoinblock?

Quoinblock is a regulated, post-quantum secure and green blockchain. With that, Quoinblock addresses the main issues of today’s public blockchains. These are the vulnerability to quantum computers, the environmentally unsustainable nature of Proof-of-Work and a lack of regulation as well as standards. Thus, Quoinblock’s overarching mission resolves around providing a blockchain that acts as a trust-granting fundament for further decentralization of our world.

What are the problems that Quoinblock can solve?

Quoinblock addresses three key issues that blockchain technology must overcome before being ready for mainstream adoption.
First, the most common consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Work, involves excessive waste of energy.
Second, Smart Contracts are difficult to develop and mistakes can have severe consequences for all involved parties.
Third, quantum computers, once available, will render traditional blockchains worthless because they solve their encryption with ease.

What purpose do Quoins serve?

Quoins will act as a unified medium of exchange of value within the Quoinblock Ecosystem. Quoins represent the foundation of the incentive structure within the ecosystem aligning the stakeholders’ interests. This will be orchestrated through a Quoin-based marketplace for dApps and Smart Contracts and through specific incentive programs where contributions will be rewarded with Quoins. An example for this are Smart Contract services where Quoins can be used to pay e.g. for smart contract execution, verification, and additional security services.

Quoinblock devises new cryptographic schemes based on cryptographic hash function and symmetric-key cryptographic algorithms, which achieve various functionalities of public-key cryptosystems, in particular the digital signature. Thus, Quoinblock is strongly quantum-proof secure.

How does Quoinblock’s Green Mining work?

Quoinblock’s Green Mining simulates Proof of Work as much as possible, except without a waste of energy. A sketch is as below (we refer full specification to technical project documents and related academic papers)

Each node will spend quoin to purchase tokens for mining rights such that any miner has to pay (virtual) resources as long as he participants in the mining competition, no matter he wins or not;

A token is determined for mining a specific block, and comes with a single entry into the hash competition on that block;

Quoinblock maintains a fair random value generated by previous blocks. Each miner broadcasts a hash value computed from the random value and his token;

Each node will have a winner candidate selected based on the received hash values of miners, and will run agreement protocol to reach consensus on the winner;

winner generates next block, and in turn the random value is updated.

Qoinblock devises a series of award and punishment to self-force nodes to follow the protocol, which well guarantees consistency and liveness.

To help repair the environmental damages caused by current (wasteful) blockchains, Quoinblock plans that these spent coins should to the extent that economics permits be transferred to environmental causes. Thus Quoinblock’s mining will be truly green.

How does Quoinblock’s Smart Contract Verification work?

Quoinblock uses multiple technologies to build a smart contract analysis toolbox that are

Fully automatic: the verification process does not require manual inputs from the user side;

Extensible: the solution can be easily extended to support additional input languages;

Feedback: the solution provides helpful feedback to the user in terms of the original smart contract if a violation is found;

Usability: the solution is accessible to non-specialist users who develop and use smart contracts, but are not experts in formal veriﬁcation.

Which kind of dApps can be created on the Quoinblock platform?

Quoinblock is a public chain and thus welcomes various dAPPs. With the goal of taking blockchain into mainstream, one main feature of Quoinblock ecosystem is to provide friendly interface for user and developers, aiming to make blockchain clients as simple as today’s web and mobile apps.